6. Pythagoras said, it is requisite to choose the most excellent life; for custom will make it pleasant. Wealth is an infirm anchor, glory is still more infirm; and in a similar manner, the body, dominion, and honour. For all these are imbecile and powerless. What then are powerful anchors. Prudence, magnanimity, fortitude. These no tempest can shake. This is the Law of God, that virtue is the only thing that is strong; and that every thing else is a trifle.

7. All the parts of human life, in the same manner as those of a statue, ought to be beautiful.

8. Frankincense ought to be given to the Gods, but praise to good men.

9. It is requisite to defend those who are unjustly accused of having acted injuriously, but to praise those who excel in a certain good.

10. Neither will the horse be adjudged to be generous, that is sumptuously adorned, but the horse whose nature is illustrious; nor is the man worthy who possesses great wealth, but he whose soul is generous.

11. When the wise man opens his mouth, the beauties of his soul present themselves

20. Those things which the body necessarily requires, are easily to be procured by all men, without labour and molestation; but those things to the attainment of which labour and molestation are requisite, are objects of desire, not to the body, but to depraved opinion.

21. Of desire also, he (Pythagoras) said as follows:--This passion is various, laborious, and very multiform. Of desires, however, some are acquired and adventitious, but others are connascent. But he defined desire itself to be a certain tendency and impulse of the soul, and an appetite of a plentitude or presence of sense, or an emptiness and absence of it, and of non-perception. He also said, that there are three most known species of erroneous and depraved desire, viz., the indecorous, the incommensurate, and the unseasonable. For desire is either immediately Indecorous, troublesome, and illiberal, or it is not absolutely so, but is more vehement and lasting than is fit. Or in the third place, it is impelled when it is not proper, and to objects to which it ought not to tend.

when it had acted iniquitously with respect to him, replied, as to a mother.

41. Travelling teaches a man frugality, and the way in which he may be sufficient to himself. For bread made of milk and flour, and a bed of grass, are the sweetest remedies of hunger and labour.

42. To the wise man every land is eligible as a place of residence; for the whole world is the country of the worthy soul.

43. Pythagoras said that luxury entered into cities in the first place, afterwards satiety, then lascivious insolence, and after all these, destruction.

44. Pythagoras said, that of cities that was the best which contained most worthy men.

45. Do those things which you judge to be beautiful, though in doing them you should be without renown. For the rabble is a bad judge of a good thing. Despise, therefore, the reprehension of those whose praise you despise.

46. Those that do not punish bad men, wish that good men may be injured.

48. It is the same thing to think greatly of yourself in prosperity, as to contend in the race in a slippery road.

49. There is not any gate of wealth so secure, which the opportunity of fortune may not open.

50. Expel by reasoning the unrestrained grief of a torpid soul.

51 . It is the province of the wise man to bear poverty with equanimity.

52. Spare your life, lest you consume it with sorrow and care.

53. Nor will I be silent as to this particular, that it appeared both to Plato and Pythagoras, that old age was not to be considered with reference to an egress from the present life, but to the beginning of a blessed life.

54. The ancient theologists and priests testify that the soul is conjoined to the body through a certain punishment, and, that it is buried in this body as in a sepulchre.

55. Whatever we see when awake is death; and when asleep, a dream.

Footnotes

47:1 Hence the dogma of the Stoics derived its origin, that the wise man is independent of fortune.